Accelerating with Amelia Gormley

Well, it’s a week out. November 30 will be release day for Acceleration, the second book in my Impulse trilogy, and I have to say, I’m very excited. I feel overall that it’s a much more solid book than Inertia was in terms of story arc and character development, and just plain writey-crafty stuff. I’m improving as an author with each book I write and I think Acceleration demonstrates that. Or at least I hope it does.

As it ties in so well with this blog post, I’m going to take this opportunity to pimp another guest blog post. Inspiration struck again in the form of a Thousand-Word Thursday pic from Cryselle, so I wrote this little ficlet, which I think you’ll find rather apropos after reading the following.

So what are some of the things you can expect to see in Acceleration?

First, as you’ve probably guessed from reading the preview of Chapter One you can find here on my blog or at the end of Inertia, there’s more sex.

I know that’s not necessarily a selling point for some people, but I’ve always been an erotic romance writer. It’s just where I live, it’s where the stories flow from me most freely. I tell stories about characters through their sexual development. Which makes sense, really. There is a lot that happens when a person is expressing him/herself sexually that gives insight into the character: fears, hopes, needs, dreams. During sex, we are often at our most vulnerable, or sometimes our most guarded.

I don’t think I include the sex necessarily for titillation sake. In fact, usually when I try to write a scene solely for titillation, the characters balk, the scene doesn’t work, and I get writers’ block. Usually with a sex scene, I need to be saying something. So what am I saying in Acceleration?

Well, this is a story about Derrick’s development within this relationship, and I always conceived Derrick as a bit of a breaking dam. He’s kept his sexuality buried under layers of pain and loss for over a decade — longer, really. I don’t go into much detail about it in Inertia but Derrick’s sex life in his one previous relationship with LeeAnn wasn’t stellar. Not because he’s gay (he identifies as bisexual, though he’s at least a 4, probably a 5 on the Kinsey scale) but because by the time he and LeeAnn began having sex, their time together was sporadic and very short. He was burdened with the care of his grandparents and she was already off at college and the process of their drifting apart had begun.

So this story is as much about Derrick’s sexual awakening and exploration as it is about him crawling out of the emotional hole he’s been hiding in for over a decade.

On the other side, it’s also about Gavin’s… well, sexual re-awakening, I guess. I can’t say too much here because it deals with information that unfolds in Acceleration, but Gavin is learning to reclaim himself and the things he once took pleasure in after his experience within his abusive relationship. On top of that, in my experience, a new relationship almost always comes packaged with a honeymoon phase where lovers can’t keep their hands off each other. I think many of us cement our new bond with another person physically, and over the course of Acceleration Derrick and Gavin are very much in this phase.

So there’s a lot more sex. There’s also much more varied sex, more kink. This is about exploration and discovery, after all, and there are emotional needs for which the characters don’t have words that come out through their sexual expression. For Derrick, who has spent so many years very un-anchored, it’s a need to belong within a unit and to stop holding on to everything so tightly, and or Gavin, a need to reclaim control of his life and his sexuality.

Which leads me to the next thing you’ll see in Acceleration which is Derrick beginning to actually deal with a lot of this baggage that has kept him from connecting with other people for so long. We see how it impacts his developing relationship with Gavin, and also how it plays against Gavin’s own baggage from his previous relationship. We see Gavin begin to learn how to re-establish his boundaries and figure out what is okay for him within a relationship and what isn’t. I think it will be interesting to see which readers favor Derrick and which ones favor Gavin when all this is done, because neither of them are perfect and they both react badly to things at times.

We meet Lukas, Gavin’s ex, and begin to get some insight into the way he behaved within his relationship with Gavin and why it’s left the marks upon Gavin that it has. We also see more of Derrick’s friends

We learn a lot more about the genesis of Derrick’s issues and just how he got to where he was at the beginning of Inertia.

So I think (hope!) there is a lot that people will like in this book and I look forward to seeing the response.

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Acceleration

Gavin Hayes is everything Derrick could ask for in a lover. Gorgeous. Passionate. Great in bed. Derrick finds it very easy to just let himself go, to let Gavin guide him and teach him all the things he missed during a decade of celibacy. In the course of a single weekend, Derrick’s routine is transformed, his mornings and evenings filled with sex. Sweet, seductive, wild, or raunchy, Gavin offers Derrick all the pleasure he’s denied himself for so long.

But learning how to be a lover in bed is one thing. Learning to be one out of bed is another. For Derrick, being alone has become habit. Sharing his confidences doesn’t come nearly as readily as sharing his bed. And after so many losses, the last thing Derrick wants is to become dependent upon another person who might not always be there.

And Gavin always being there is far from certain. With an ex-lover lurking in the background, and the question of Gavin’s future health still outstanding, neither Gavin nor Derrick feel capable of asking for anything more than right now. But Gavin won’t be kept on the fringes of Derrick’s life. Can Derrick let someone in before the opportunity passes him by?

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Pam here: I read this book in its raw form, and it rocked even then, so I can hardly wait to get my hands on the finished story! Definitely check out the ficlet, and there’s another one from the very beginning of Gavin and Derrick’s relationship you’ll like too.